Greek hero cult

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Cult hero redirects here. For the Cure side project, see I'm a Cult Hero.

Ruins of a hero-shrine or heroon at Sagalassos, Turkey

Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. In
Homeric Greek, hero (????, h?ros) refers to a man who was fighting on either side
during the Trojan War. By the historical period, however, the word came to mean
specifically a dead man, venerated and propitiated at his tomb or at a designated
shrine, because his fame during life or unusual manner of death gave him power to
support and protect the living. A hero was more than human but less than a god, and
various kinds of supernatural figures came to be assimilated to the class of
heroes; the distinction between a hero and a god was less than certain, especially
in the case of Heracles, the most prominent, but atypical hero.[1]

The grand ruins and tumuli remaining from the Bronze Age gave the pre-literate
Greeks of the 10th and 9th centuries BC a sense of a grand and vanished age that
was reflected in the oral epic tradition, which would be crystallized in the Iliad.
Copious renewed offerings begin to be represented, after a hiatus, at sites like
Lefkandi,[2] even though the names of the grandly buried dead were hardly
remembered. Stories began to be told to individuate the persons who were now
believed to be buried in these old and imposing sites, observes Robin Lane Fox.[3]

Contents [hide]
1 Nature of hero cult
2 Heroes and heroines
3 Types of hero cult
4 Heroes, politics, and gods
5 List of heroes
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
Nature of hero cult[edit]
Greek hero-cults were distinct from the clan-based ancestor worship from which they
developed,[4] in that as the polis evolved, they became a civic rather than
familial affair, and in many cases none of the worshipers traced their descent back
to the hero any longer no shrine to a hero can be traced unbroken from Mycenaean
times. Whereas the ancestor was purely local, Lewis Farnell observed, the hero
might be tended in more than one locality, and he deduced that hero-cult was more
deeply influenced from the epic tradition, that suggested many a name to forgotten
graves,[5] and provided even Dorians a connection to Mycenaean heroes, according to
Coldstream.[6] Coldstream believed the currency of epic would account for votives
in Dorian areas, where an alien, immigrant population might otherwise be expected
to show no particular reverence for Mycenaean predecessors.[7] Large Mycenaean
tholos tombs that betokened a grander past, were often the site of hero-cults. Not
all heroes were even known by names.

Cult of Oedipus on a Lucanian amphora, ca. 380-70 BC (Louvre, CA 308)

Aside from the epic tradition, which featured the heroes alive and in action rather
than as objects of cultus,[8] the earliest written reference to hero-cult is
attributed to Dracon, the Athenian lawgiver of the late seventh century BC, who
prescribed that gods and local heroes should both be honoured according to
ancestral custom. The custom, then, was already established, and there were
multiple local heroes.[9] The written sources emphasise the importance of heroes'
tombs and the temenos or sanctuary, where chthonic rites appeased their spirits and
induced them to continue to favour the people who looked to them as founders, of
whom founding myths were related. In the hero's restricted and local scope he
retained the limited and partisan interests of his mortal life. He would help those
who lived in the vicinity of his tomb or who belonged to the tribe of which he
himself was the founder, observes Robert Parker,[10] with the reservation that
Heracles, with his pan-Hellenic scope was again the exception.

Whitley interpreted the final stage, in which hero-cult was co-opted by the city-
state as a political gesture, in the archaic aristocratic tumulus surrounded by
stelae, erected by Athens to the cremated citizen-heroes of Marathon (490 BC), to
whom chthonic cult was dedicated, as the offering trenches indicate.[11] On the
other hand, Greek heroes were distinct from the Roman cult of dead emperors,
because the hero was not thought of as having ascended to Olympus or become a god
he was beneath the earth, and his power purely local. For this reason hero cults
were chthonic in nature, and their rituals more closely resembled those for Hecate
and Persephone than those for Zeus and Apollo libations in the dark hours,
sacrifices that were not shared by the living.

The two exceptions to the above were Heracles and Asclepius, who might be honored
as either heroes or gods, with chthonic libation or with burnt sacrifice. Heroes in
cult behaved very differently from heroes in myth. They might appear indifferently
as men or as snakes, and they seldom appeared unless angered. A Pythagorean saying
advises not to eat food that has fallen on the floor, because it belongs to the
heroes. Heroes if ignored or left unappeased could turn malicious in a fragmentary
play by Aristophanes, a chorus of anonymous heroes describe themselves as senders
of lice, fever and boils.

Some of the earliest hero and heroine cults well attested by archaeological
evidence in mainland Greece include the Menelaion dedicated to Menelaus and Helen
at Therapne near Sparta, a shrine at Mycenae dedicated to Agamemnon and Cassandra,
another at Amyklai dedicated to Alexandra, and another in Ithaca's Polis Bay
dedicated to Odysseus. These all seem to date to the 8th century BC.[12] The cult
of Pelops at Olympia dates from the Archaic period.

Heroes and heroines[edit]

Hero cults were offered most prominently to men, though in practice the experience
of the votary was of propitiating a cluster of family figures, which included women
who were wives of a hero-husband, mothers of a hero-son (Alcmene and Semele), and
daughters of a hero-father.[13] As Finley observed of the world of Odysseus, which
he reads as a nostalgic eighth-century rendering of traditions from the culture of
Dark Age Greece,

Penelope became a moral heroine for later generations, the embodiment of goodness
and chastity, to be contrasted with the faithless, murdering Clytaemnestra,
Agamemnon's wife; but 'hero' has no feminine gender in the age of heroes.[14]

Where local cult venerated figures such as the sacrificial virgin Iphigeneia, an
archaic local nymphe has been reduced to a mortal figure of legend. Other isolated
female figures represented priestess-initiators of a local cult. Iconographic and
epigraphal evidence marshalled by Larson combine to depict heroines as similar in
kind to heroes, but in androcentric Greek culture,[15] typically of lesser stature.

Types of hero cult[edit]

Offerings to a deified hero and another deity, depicted on a Greek marble relief
ca. 300 BC
Whitley distinguishes four or five essential types of hero cult[16]

Oikist cults of founders.[17] Such cults arose in colonies in the Hellenic world in
Magna Graecia and Sicily at the grave of the founder, the oikos. In the case of
cults at the tombs of the recently heroised, it must be assumed that the identity
of the occupant of the tomb was unequivocally known. Thucydides (V.11.1) gives the
example of Brasidas at Amphipolis. Battus of Cyrene might also be mentioned. Such
historical examples, Whitley warns, have clearly colored the interpretation of
certain tomb cults in the Archaic period. Such Archaic sites as the heroon at
Lefkandi and that close to the West Gate at Eretria cannot be distinguished by
archaeological methods from family observances at tombs (tomb cults) and the cult
of ancestors.
Cults to named heroes. A number of cult sites known in Classical times were
dedicated to known heroes in the Greek and modern senses, especially of the Iliad
and other episodes of the Epic Cycle. Whitley makes two points here, first that the
earliest heria associate the male hero with earlier and stronger female presences,
and second, that figures such as Odysseus, Agamemnon and Menelaus all have strong
local connections. The cults of Oedipus at Athens and Pelops at Olympia are
examples.
Cults to local heroes. Such local figures do not figure among the Panhellenic
figures of epic. Examples would be Akademos and Erechtheus at Athens.
Cults at Bronze Age tombs. These are represented archaeologically by Iron Age
deposits in Mycenaean tombs, not easily interpreted. Because of the gap in time
between the Bronze Age collapse and the earliest votive objects, continuity appears
to be broken. A sherd from above the Grave Circle A at Mycenae is simply inscribed
to the hero,[18] and Whitley suggests that the unnamed race of the Silver Age might
have been invoked. In Attica, such cults are those associated with tholos tombs at
Thorikos and Menidhi.
Oracular hero cults. Whitley does not address this group of local cults where an
oracle developed, as in the case of Amphiaraus, who was swallowed up by a gaping
crack in the earth. Minor cults accrued to some figures who died violent or unusual
deaths, as in the case of the dead from the Battle of Marathon, and those struck by
lightning, as in several attested cases in Magna Graecia.
Heroes, politics, and gods[edit]
Hero cults could be of the utmost political importance. When Cleisthenes divided
the Athenians into new demes for voting, he consulted Delphi on what heroes he
should name each division after. According to Herodotus, the Spartans attributed
their conquest of Arcadia to their theft of the bones of Orestes from the Arcadian
town of Tegea. Heroes in myth often had close but conflicted relationships with the
gods. Thus Heracles's name means the glory of Hera, even though he was tormented
all his life by the queen of the gods. This was even truer in their cult
appearances. Perhaps the most striking example is the Athenian king Erechtheus,
whom Poseidon killed for choosing Athena over him as the city's patron god. When
the Athenians worshiped Erechtheus on the Acropolis, they invoked him as Poseidon
Erechtheus.